Hard Play

Hard work and planning ahead. It's the not-so-secret ingredient to success. 

How did you get so wealthy? Hard work and keeping my eye on the prize.

How did you win the championship? Hard work and lots of practice.

How did you grow your business? Hard work and a good business plan.

Of course, people will also attribute some of their success to others -- spouses, employees, teammates -- and some are humble enough to credit their god, but at the end of the day, it's the hard work, they tell us, that allowed them to separate themselves from the also-rans.

We want our children to learn to work hard, to have grit, to get back up when they fall down, to learn to set goals and strive. We worry when they seem lazy, overly sensitive, easily discouraged, or aimless. Our schools are set up with the values of hard work and planning at their core. We worry when things are "too easy" for a kid, so we have special programs to challenge them. We worry when they don't know how to concentrate on the task at hand, prioritize, or are too easily diverted. We even go so far as the drug children who struggle with this.

By the same token, we tend to shake our heads when someone fails, tut-tutting that they could have worked harder or that they could have had a smarter plan.

Everyone knows that hard work and planning are the keys to the kingdom. Indeed, it's "common knowledge."

But I'm not convinced that hard work and planning pay off. Or rather, I don't believe there is any real evidence that hard work and planning increase one's odds of success any more than, say, natural talent or sheer good luck.

"Work" is one thing, but "hard work" is quite another. The inclusion of the modifier "hard" suggests that this is something we would rather not be doing; that we would much rather be doing something else, but we've put our nose to the grindstone in service to our plan or goal. By its very nature, "hard work" doesn't pay off now, the only moment any of us truly possess, but rather at some point in the non-existent future. In other words, hard work calls for us to sacrifice our certain joys and pleasures on the alter of planning. And as the Yiddish proverb cautions us, "Man plans and God laughs."

No, despite proclamations of the victors, my experience has been that hard work does not inevitably lead to success. Far from it. Plenty of people, most people in fact, work very hard indeed, and success still eludes them. I'm thinking of those single mothers working three minimum wage jobs, but who still can't pull their family out of poverty. I'm thinking of all those minor league baseball players who work their tails off, but never make it to the big leagues. I'm thinking of the 95 percent of small businesses that fail within five years. Cold-hearted critics will say, "Ah, but if only they had worked harder." Or worse, "If only they had worked smarter," which is a dig at their poor planning. But the evidence seems clear to me that hard work and planning are hardly guarantees of success: most of us will still fail in the hard work and planning paradigm, no matter how heavily we mortgage our present to pay for the future.

There are those who will insist that hard work is its own reward. A life doing the things I'd rather not be doing at the expense of things that could bring me joy or satisfaction right now? Sound like flimflammery to me. There a those who warn us "If you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there," but that's a recipe for arriving at a destination only to find you've missed out on the beauty along the way.

Throughout my career as an early childhood educator, a career I never planned for, but rather fell into, I've lived among humans who haven't yet bought into the ethos of hard work and planning. Oh sure, they apply themselves in ways that might look a lot like the proverbial hard work, but because it is entirely self-selected, because it is done in service to the moment rather than some distant goal or objective, we know it as play. Hard play if you will. And unlike hard work, which must come at a cost, hard play is genuinely its own reward. It's how we learn about ourselves, our passions, and what makes us come alive. Hard work is inflexible. The dictate to keep your head down and focus on the prize causes us to ignore the flowers, to set our relationships aside, and to live for an imagined future. Hard play, on the other hand, is infinitely flexible. It ensures that we will stop and smell the flowers, to treasure our relationships, and keeps us anchored in the only thing any of us really have -- Now!

Too often, we adults look at children engaged in hard play, and assume it is our responsibility to impose hard work upon them "for their own good," but we would be much better, I think, to step back and learn from them . . . for our own good. These are the humans who are living authentically. They might not always be happy, but they are successful. They teach us that the real secret to success is hard play and flexibility.

In our society, the "successful" will always claim, in hindsight, that their secret is hard work and planning, but that ignores the vast majority who work hard and plan, yet still find themselves coming up short. 

What I have learned from children is that hard play and flexibility may or may not lead to riches or glory, but it will always leads to success.

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